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No, Newt, You're the Racist

In the heat of the moment (I hope), he today stooped to branding Sonia Sotomayor a “racist” via his Twitter feed. This is a preposterous claim, and it says more about him—and the know-nothing wing of the Republican party he would like to represent—than it does about President Obama’s Supreme Court pick, whose alleged racist crimes were to call herself a "wise Latina" with better judgment than a "white male," and to not overturn a decision by the city of New Haven to scrap a fire department promotion test accused of disproportionately favoring white (and Hispanic) applicants.

The "wise Latina" remark was taken out of context, and at least one conservative critic, Rod Dreher, now admits he was wrong to make an issue of it. But while the fire department decision may not have been ideal, to say that it makes Sotomayor a racist is flatly absurd. Leaving aside the intricacies of the case, however, I’d like to address the common conservative refrain that proponents of affirmative action are guilty of “reverse racism.”

Now, I’m not one of those people who believes that members of minorities are by definition incapable of being racist. But I do believe that the Republican party’s endless obsession with “reverse racism” is a form of racism itself.Let’s step back a moment.

Both Republicans and Democrats have long, ugly histories of anti-black prejudice. Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation helped turn Democrats in the South into defenders of slave-holding values.

A century later, Richard M. Nixon minted the Republican Party’s diabolical Southern Strategy, which involved courting racist voters. The strategy was so successful that the Grand Old Party is now thriving in the Deep South—even as it’s failing most everywhere else.

The fact remains, however, that today’s Republican party owes a lot more to Nixon than it does to Lincoln. Racism, which I would define broadly as the belief that some races are inferior to others (and therefore deserve to be subjugated), is still part of the program.

Not that any Republican you meet would ever cop to being a racist. In fact, calling a Republican a racist is a good way to get your head bashed in. Somewhere along the line, overt racism became about as socially acceptable as pederasty, which I guess is a good thing.

Except that instead of becoming not racist, conservatives have busied themselves changing the definition of racism so it doesn’t apply to them anymore. The holy grail in this effort is the ongoing attempt to brand non-white, anti-racist activists as … racists.

The essential contours of this argument are simple enough: if we’re not allowed to discriminate against you for being brown, then you can’t discriminate against us for being white.

The reason so few sensible people take it seriously is that there is no effective anti-white discrimination in America or, for that matter, the world. Being white is almost universally easier than being any other color, just as being male is almost universally easier than being female. (If you’re white, male, and still angry, the problem is you.)

Conservatives like to point to the language of Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, Sister Souljah, and Al Sharpton, but the ultimate target of that (outdated) rhetoric is white racism. Hating all white people because some white people are racist may technically count as a form of racial prejudice, but it barely registers when compared with the regime of institutional racism that enabled white people to buy and sell black people for hundreds of years and created a society that remains significantly unequal to this day.

Conservatives also like to object that slavery ended 144 years ago, but you don’t even have to cite the historical nearness of the Civil Rights movement to prove that objection irrelevant.

Consider this: the first known instance of slavery in America was recorded in 1619, which means that slavery existed here for 9.8 generations (using the current U.S. generation span of 25.2 years). It ended 5.7 generations ago.

For 9.8 generations, black people were systematically subjugated, their families systematically dismantled, their bodies systematically objectified.

White people, by contrast, had 9.8 generations to exploit black labor, profit from black productivity without giving anything back, accrue to themselves as many advantages as they possibly could, all under the cover of the law.

For four more generations after the 13th amendment abolished slavery, whites in much of the country defended and pressed their advantages under a new set of unfair laws, epitomized by the false logic of “separate but equal.”

If you want to be extremely generous to American equality and the goodwill of white people everywhere, the best you can argue is that whites and blacks have been on equal footing for less than two generations.

In a perfect meritocracy, maybe that would be enough to level the playing field. But we don’t live in a perfect meritocracy. Legacy matters, family matters, connections matter, and inevitably, unless the law insists otherwise, skin color matters. Maybe not to you, but to plenty of people.

So, yes, it’s preposterous to call advocates of affirmative action and all its sibling policies racist. If you think they’re illogical, or counterproductive, that’s your right. We can have an adult conversation about it.

But if you’re going to call brown people racist because they believe in protecting other brown people from white racism, I don’t have anything to say to you.